Deconstructing the idea of ''Toxic Masculinity''
Up until last year I hadn’t heard this term before, and now it seems to be everywhere. So, I’ve been looking into it from all sides and I want to say my piece. When most people talk about men’s issues it’s phrased in the way of “toxic masculinity” or at the very least, the term is brought up. So, what is “toxic masculinity” as it’s defined? The only definition I could find that wasn’t some vague concept “men behaving badly or getting screwed over for being men” is that it refers to the attitudes of the negative aspects of the male gender role/negative stereotypes of what “being a man” is: violent, hypersexual, aggressive, etc. I have… many feelings based on this. Let’s start with my kneejerk reaction. If you define all negative aspects of being a man as “toxic masculinity” then you do not get to say it’s because of “toxic masculinity” that being a man has negative aspects. This is called circular reasoning. I know it sounds… weird. But all too often when I see men’s issues brought up, like the draft, or being assumed to be the aggressor in domestic disputes, it’s just blamed on “toxic masculinity.” I repeat that the definition of toxic masculinity is the negative attitudes towards the male gender role/men. The bad aspects of masculinity are caused by the bad aspects of masculinity. So… um… in other news, water is wet. It doesn’t stop the flood. But let’s go beyond knee-jerk reactions and talk about this. And I want to talk about the response to fighting it, because while people seem to have their hearts in the right place, people don’t always seem to be tackling things from the best angle. On YouTube, you can find the short film called “The Mask You Wear” which is largely about the aspects of what is considered “toxic masculinity,” or at least two of them: the assumption of violent tendencies and the expectation of emotional stoicism. At one point during the video, a man says “the worst three words you can say to a boy is ‘be a man.’” I get the intention. Saying things like “man up” in response to a man trying to complain about his problems is wrong and regressive thinking. However the way that was phrased was horrible. I reply with this, what’s so wrong about being a man? And this is the entire paradox, saying that it’s okay to be a man, while dealing with the negative stereotypes of being a man. All too often, when people try to tackle “toxic masculinity” they frame it as saying “you don’t have to/shouldn’t be masculine.” And that’s so backwards I can barely fathom the logic behind it. For a couple of reasons. Number one: being masculine is not a bad thing. Number two: it’s generally not a man’s choice whether he falls into the male gender role, or not. Let’s start with number one. Why is being masculine bad? You know what, I know the answer to that. I’ve been hearing it for plenty of years. Men are abusers, rapists, and they take up too much space on public transportation. Being abusive is not a part of masculinity. Raping people is not a part of masculinity. Really, it’s not. Don’t men do these things more often than women though? With abuse, the answer is no. With rape the answer is maybe, and the answer to violent crimes in general is a yes. So, let me phrase the question like this. Is committing fraud a part of being feminine or female? Women commit more frauds than men. But most people don’t commit crimes, because people are not statistics. What is masculinity? Is it strength? Is it stoicism? I don’t know. What I know is this. The traditional role of men is the protector and the provider. Right now for example, people seem to be considering annexing the draft in the US to women as well as men. There are two camps of people who are against this. The first are the people who pretend to be about equality, and say “well… the chances of has having another draft again are so low, it’ll just be a waste of time to do it.” Alright fair enough, I hope I can get your support in abolishing the draft entirely if it’s never going to happen again. If we don’t need it, we don’t need it. It’s an outdated artifact of the past, and we can save everyone from the reminder of horrible times gone by The other camp is the one saying that “I couldn’t fathom us sending our daughters out there in a fox hole with some psychopath to die.” Really analyze that statement. For some reason he wouldn’t have a problem with us sending our sons out there to die. They’re… expected to. That’s why men have to, by law, sign up for the selective service. Women are still seen as nurturers by society, but, while they may get flack for it by wider society, they can choose to not have any children and there will be no legal consequences about it. “This is because men are expected to be violent killers and defend the homeland.” Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy then ain’t it? I mean if we abolish the draft or extend it to all, then that piece of toxic masculinity will go away and the day is more equal for all, right? So… we could either call a bird, a vertebrate with feathers and the capacity to lay eggs, or we can get it off of my yard and stop it from eating my food. Only one solves the problem. Toxic masculinity is… dismissive, except when it’s not. Except when it’s demonization. The worst things that men do are often blamed on toxic masculinity - the violent outrages, the crimes, the deaths, the suicides. Men are both the causes and the victims of the most violent crimes. They also make up more suicides than women across the world. All of them are blamed on “toxic masculinity.” What part of masculinity says that it’s okay to start shooting people up rampantly? To mug or murder someone in the street? To blow your brains out? If you want to blame it on masculinity, let’s open a dialogue and figure out what exactly is wrong. If you really want to blame it on masculinity, you at least owe these people a way out, instead of just pointing fingers at some nebulous concept and saying that these people are suffering because of this concept. The traditional male role is the protector and provider. A man who doesn’t protect (runs away from his family to protect his own life during a shooting) is seen as a coward. A man who doesn’t provide - either through his fault or not - is seen as a loser, a deadbeat, a manchild. Is a man dying to protect his wife and children and becoming one of those victim statistics, succumbing to toxic masculinity? Or just masculinity in general. Is it either? You see, if I called that scenario just plain “masculinity” I’d be instantly called out about how self-sacrifice of such a grand magnitude isn’t just for men or masculinity. If adding a detail like that… takes it away from masculinity, then men just dying to violent crimes has to have a bigger explanation than just “toxic masculinity.” But you have to see, nothing exists in a vacuum. And if you want to call out the bad things “masculinity” does for society (men putting themselves in high-risk scenarios), you have to realize that there are good things that “masculinity” does as well (men putting themselves in high-risk scenarios for others). All too often, I see the people who claim “toxic masculinity” is the reason for all of these deaths thinking that being a man is just one giant contest to see who can get the most impressive Darwin award. Every murder, every suicide, every crime and death has a logical explanation and a larger story to tell. Only stupid men walk down dark alleyways in the middle of the night. You know, unless they’re chasing after a thief who just mugged something because that chivalrous instinct kicked in. But let’s go into the story of the mugger, the thief, the murderer. Obviously not every single one is caused by a moral reason. The vast majority are not. Why are men the actors of most of the violent crimes? Theories come across in testosterone or the y-chromosome or something biological. It’s not testosterone: www.scientificamerican.com/art…. Testosterone alone does not cause aggression. If testosterone were the cause though, there would be a lot more men causing these crimes. They’d be the majority, not the minority. As for mental illness, it seems that increased testosterone is good for men’s mood: lowers depression, and decreases anger: press.endocrine.org/doi/abs/10… Alright, if it’s not biological, then it has to be cultural. What to do we do to men/boys and not to women/girls that makes them turn to violence? It’s often said that men commit suicide so much because they don’t go out and go to therapy. Valid explanation. But… why don’t men go out and go to therapy? If you want to play that game, we’ll play that game. Remember, if women weren’t going to therapy and we thought that that would help them, or we thought that there weren’t enough of them getting into higher education, we’d create all kinds of marketing to get them there and ways to make it easier for them to get there. “Men don’t go to therapy” is not an answer. It is a problem. Why don’t they? The number one reason is that therapy is seen as an unnecessary financial burden. Not because they’re afraid of being all talky-feely. Or that they’ll feel emasculated for getting help. When men are valued for what they can provide, they’re not going to throw money away on something that a.) they don’t know will work or b.) doesn’t work quick enough to solve the problem. Let’s think about it. To solve a problem with therapy can take years. Years of paying upwards of 150 dollars a month. However, alcohol is much cheaper and it gives the illusion of solving the problem. Why don’t men go to the doctor more often? Why do you assume that all men are rich/live in an area with socialized health care? There are plenty of men, of all ethnicities, that live in America making too much money to afford medicare and not making enough to afford their own good health insurance. And medicare doesn’t cover mental health anyway. That 150 dollars a month could be used on something that the entire family could use, like cable television or some extra groceries or fixing the goddamn car that keeps breaking. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Yes, there are many families with both parents working, but that doesn’t… exactly mean they’re doing well off. Lower middle class problems, working overtime with two paychecks just to dodge the poverty line. It doesn’t change the scenario much, does it? But what about those men who live alone? I mean there are plenty of bachelors out there who don’t have anyone to provide for? Well, ignoring the ones who are paying off their student loans, sure. They’re the people our society dubs have “Peter Pan Syndrome” and refuse to grow up and start their own families. So… um… there’s that. Maybe just assuming that “men just don’t go to therapy” is an attempt to band-aid more intense societal problems. But it’s not always adults who find themselves in this role (or who are mocked for leaving it) finding themselves doing horrible crimes. Young teenagers, predominately male, have been known to do many crimes. Let’s talk about school shootings, which have been blamed on toxic masculinity. And they’ve been blamed on everything else too. Before I go on, I will say this: explaining someone’s actions is not rationalizing them, and it is not condoning them. There is no excuse for what any of these people did. The most notable school shooting in history was Columbine. It wasn’t the first, but it was one of the most extreme up to that point, with an unprecedented 15 dead and 24 injured. While the media blamed Doom for its violence, one of the kids was literally a sociopath. And both of them were bullied. The Virginia Tech massacre was caused by a South Korean student named Cho Seung-Hu. He had several mental illnesses, including severe depression and an anxiety disorder. He was bullied because of this. The Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Peter Lanza, had several mental disorders as well, everything from OCD to possible schizophrenia. At the time of his death, he was even discovered to have anorexia. This shooting was most likely caused by mental illness. The Oikos University Shooting was caused by One L. Goh, another South Korean man. The chief of police said that he was “upset that students in the past, when he attended the school, mistreated him, disrespected him, and things of that nature.” He was asked to leave the school a few months prior due to behavioral problems. And he was discovered to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Are we beginning to notice a pattern here? Most of these mass shootings seem to be caused by mental disorders and bullying. So, that begs the question. Is there something about being male that makes more likely to have a mental disorder or get bullied? If the answer is no, then we must ask how bullied/mentally ill females are treated and why they don’t go on rampages. If the answer is yes, then we’re going to have to dissect that. Let’s start with… who gets more mental illnesses, men or women? Well, the answer is not as cut and dry as that. There are many factors and many mental illnesses are egalitarian. And… it’s not always easy to tell what the right answer is. For example, in England, women report having more mental disorders than men. But is that because men aren’t going to therapy or is it because women have more mental disorders? We do know that some mental disorders like autism or ADHD affect more men than women and some affect more women than men. But even that’s not cut and dry. People say we’re only getting less female autism diagnoses because they’re socialized/develop in ways that mask the symptoms and that we’re massively over diagnosing boys with ADHD. Okay, how are the male victims of bullying and the female victims of bullying treated. When a boy is bullied, he could be told to man up. When I was bullied, I was repeatedly told by my step father to hit the bully. And schools selectively enforce zero tolerance policies towards bullying. Are boys bullied more frequently than girls? Most statistics say yes. We can pocket the “why” for now, although the “why” may be the methods of bullying. While a boy bully will beat the shit out of you, a girl bully will start a rumor that destroys your reputation. How are female victims of bullying treated, assuming that the bully is also female? How is the girl stereotypically bullied? That’s right, through social media. Didn’t I just talk about Twitter’s anti-harassment campaign? Spooky. What is more likely to get a media response? The girl who kills herself over being cyberbullied or the boy who gets stabbed, or shoots himself because no one was listening? So… let’s say a boy is being physically bullied. He’s told to man up and throw a punch back. This is how he learns to deal with problems and as the problems get harder and harder to punch he needs to upgrade his arsenal. That’s the traditional story, right? The problem with that is that there’s a lot more boys being told to “man up” than going on brutal killing sprees. Suicide, which can technically be called a type of murder - murder of the self - is often known as a “cry for help.” What if these murders, the ones not caused by paranoid delusions, are cries for help. Not because people are being told to “man up” but the meaning behind the words “I don’t care.” Saying that “you don’t have to be a man” or “you don’t have to be masculine” can be destructive. For one, yes, every person born a boy, who identifies as male, who makes it adulthood, by definition, has to be a man. That’s how growing up works. And telling someone that there’s something wrong with a fundamental part of who they are is wrong beyond belief. As for, “you don’t have to be masculine,” it gives boys the most mixed messages ever. First of all, it says that being too masculine is bad. Would anyone disrespect a woman’s choice to be “too feminine”? Second of all men are socially and legally required to be masculine. If they’re not protectors and providers, they’re manchildren who refuse to grow up or cowards. And it isn’t just men saying that. Reading between the lines I get this claim a lot “It’s not my fault that you’re a protector/provider - it’s either your fault, or the fault of long dead people who share your gender - and you can leave it at any time, but you better damn be that protector/provider or else you’re worthless.” Mixed messages, is all I’m saying. And no, I can’t leave it. If I somehow become a parent - even if I was raped, or a woman stole my sperm from the trash or dump - I am legally bound to my role of a provider. If a draft is ever cast upon this country, I am legally bound to my role of a protector. #MasculinitySoFragile you need a shit ton of laws and social shaming to keep men chained to it. You know, I have mixed feelings towards CollegeHumor. But, here’s something I noticed with two shorts that really expresses things, when played back-to-back. For when men act stereotypical: www.youtube.com/watch?v=20GeLS… For when men don’t: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p6LVZ… So… should men act stereotypical, or shouldn’t they? Why are both ways of life worthy of being mocked Collegehumor? Actually, My Little Pony, funnily enough is what got me to think about this whole spiel. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, often preaches that there’s no wrong way to be a girl. There’s no wrong way to be a woman. The idea of toxic masculinity flat out stays that there’s a wrong way to be a boy or a man. Is there a wrong way to be a man? There’s certainly a bad way to be a person. If you rape or abuse or murder, you are a bad person. “But these are all ideas that come out of the male gender role” I have so many problems with this kind of thinking. I mean, let’s start with the obvious. Would having more kids than you could handle be considered toxic femininity? Would the female bully taking a lesson, from Mean Girls be considered toxic femininity? They could come out of extensions of the female gender role, right? Would you ever blame a teenage girl starving herself to look beautiful, succumbing to toxic femininity? Then why would you do it to the teenage boy who took his own life due to people telling him to “man up”, toxic masculinity? Both of them are different coping mechanisms for the exact same problem: lack of acceptance. Not all women who adhere strongly to their traditional gender role do that. The same applies to men, even men who strongly adhere to their traditional gender role. The dark side, the “toxic masculinity” is not a part of the male gender role at all. How many boys are explicitly taught “not to hit a girl,” even if she instigated the fight? And that poses us into an interesting scenario. A female beats up a male, abuses him constantly. When the police finally do get involved, everyone assumes that it’s the male’s fault. This is a textbook example of “toxic masculinity.” So… what happens when “toxic masculinity” gets removed? Well… um… he… hits back? So, now we have two people beating the crap out of each other. Why does removing “toxic masculinity” make the problem worse? Or at the very least, focusing on it won’t solve what actually caused the problem: someone had the desire to hurt another person. Neither gender is immune to this, and as we grow up, we learn to control it and diminish it. Or we become unstable human beings. Do you know what does not get us to control it? Telling us that it is an undeniable part of who we are. Telling us that we can snap at any moment and turn into a danger. You can tell a man that being male or masculine is bad all day. It won’t make him less male, or less masculine. And when he realizes it, he will feel like you - intentionally or not - were calling him bad. And being bad, or disenfranchised, gives you license to do whatever the hell you want with no moral convictions. Ascribing rape and abuse and murder to the male gender role can be… very counterproductive. We… don’t want men to do these things, right? But… that’s what men do, right? Bad people rape and abuse and murder. Good people do not rape and abuse and murder. It has nothing to do with their genitalia. People who rape and abuse and murder should be ashamed. People shouldn’t be ashamed of being male or female. If toxic masculinity really is the cause, we shouldn’t directly blame it. Let me paint this example. There’s a series of car crashes, all from the same brand. This is caused by a faulty brake line. If you hit the brake too quickly, it will not engage. What people do when they blame problems on “toxic masculinity” is that they tend to tell people not to slam on the break so quickly instead of going to the manufacturer and suing their asses. And I like this metaphor because the guys who die from “toxic masculinity” don’t really have the option to sue to the manufacturer, being dead and all. We need to get that faulty brake line fixed, instead of telling people how to drive with it. Category:Miscellaneous